Tag Archives: tanzania

Wilderness 4: Wilderness degradation analysis

Area with wilderness and encroachment. Visualization of change of wilderness status.

Area with wilderness and encroachment. Visualization of change of wilderness status.

Wilderness degradation happens when new encroachments are made changing the wilderness status of an area. It is a complex issue which does not easily lend it self to a GIS based analysis. I will refer to my posting on wilderness for a peek into the complex world of wilderness philosophy.

It is possible to set up a system like FME to do an analysis of changes in wilderness due to new encroachments. The procedure I made generates a wilderness degradation data set based on wilderness and (new) encroachment data. It is based on procedures used by the Norwegian government in their analysis of wilderness and encroachment. The system should however be easy to accommodate for different preconditions by manipulating the number of wilderness zones and/or their buffer distances.

To visualize the degradation of wilderness it is necessary to make a categorization and furthermore establish a cartography to carry the information to the reader. In my view this can not be done unless the author/mapmaker to some extent takes side in what is good or not good related to wilderness degradation. This will be the focus on a forthcoming posting, but I will touch into the issues here as well.

FME is but one of the potential solutions for producing the results. QGISGeoKettle and even PostGIS could be good alternatives. The GitHub project has room for alternative implementations.

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Development cooperation GIS

For almost ten years now I have been working in the areas environment and development cooperation with geographical Information Systems (GIS) as my foremost tool. My recent postings and tweets about the theme begs for a proper term and a definition. I have chosen development cooperation GIS. For my tweets I will follow up with the twitter hashtag #devcogis.

Looking at the term development cooperation GIS I will point to related policy level work and exemplify the development cooperation GIS by highlighting current projects where it could find its use. I will also briefly present parts of my own work and discuss challenges in development cooperation GIS.

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